Harper is cast in the image of the bumbling George Steinbrenner as lampooned on Seinfeld

No 769 Posted by fw, June 8, 2013

As a general rule, I have no problem with agressively attacking an opponent’s ideas, but draw the line at personal attacks. However, in the case of Greenpeace’s video ad attacking Harper, I make an exception — he deserves to be ridiculed for his $16 million Tar Sands Greenwash ad campaign. (See, for example, Harper government’s Go With Canada website).

Greenpeace Canada is seeking your help to raise $25,000 to put the following ad on prime time TV –

(Note about this embedded You Tube version – There are three separate parts that run automatically in sequence: the first is 40 seconds, the second is 3:06 minutes and the third is 2:44 minutes).

Here’s a copy of Greenpeace’s June 6, 2013 email —

Let’s laugh Harper’s tar sands ads off the air

As you read this email the Harper government is spending $16 million of your tax money on an ad campaign to paint the tar sands as ‘environmentally friendly’.

We’ve come up with a plan to make this government ‘greenwash’ campaign the laughing stock of Canada, and it involves you!

What the government’s greenwash ad campaign doesn’t tell you is how Canadian environmental laws were gutted in order to fast-track new tar sands mines and pipelines as part of the omnibus budget bills. And it certainly doesn’t tell you how reckless tar sands development has made Canada one of the world’s biggest contributors to climate change.

We think this is ripe for some old-fashioned Canadian satire, so we’ve created our own ad campaign. While we will never be able to match the government and oil industry ad budgets, with your help we can use humour to turn their own ad budgets against them.

If enough people see our ads, the tar sands spin doctors will soon realize that the more of our tax money they spend on public relations to sell the tar sands as environmentally friendly, the more ridiculous they are making themselves look. Our goal is for them to cancel their ads faster than you can say, “oil spills create jobs.”

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